'Caligula' Gives a Toga Party (but No One's Really Invited)

When movie stars agree to work without payment, accept equal billing and happily follow the bidding of a conceptual artist, it must mean that Francesco Vezzoli has come to call.

Last spring, Mr. Vezzoli, a 34-year-old artist from Milan whose videos have featured international stars like Catherine Deneuve, Helmut Berger and Sonia Braga, lined up Benicio Del Toro, Helen Mirren and Karen Black, among others, to appear in a fake promotional short, "Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's 'Caligula,' " complete with togas by Donatella Versace.

It will be screened in New York beginning this week as part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, opening on Thursday at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The biennial, titled "Day for Night" -- evoking, like the 1973 Truffaut film of that name, a perceptual twilight zone -- is already being called the "post-American" biennial, for its inclusion of foreign-born artists. Although Mr. Vezzoli does not live in the United States, his trailer was filmed at a neo-Roman villa on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

A five-and-a-half-minute, 35-millimeter video, the short ostensibly promotes a film about a mad Roman emperor (Mr. Vezzoli in a cameo) who sleeps with his sister, executes his critics and presides over a crowd of ambisexual extras dressed only in the occasional accessory.

Let no one call it pornography. For one thing, it's too funny. And at its core is a political satire in which Mr. Vezzoli takes aim at the lust for power -- what he defines as a "desire for visibility" -- that he sees afflicting contemporary art these days as well as politics and religion.

"For me, the art world has become a place that has turned itself, willingly or not, into some sort of entertainment industry," Mr. Vezzoli said in a recent interview in Manhattan. The artist makes an appearance in the video to underscore his intent: "I hate being in my work," he said, "but I think it is more meaningful if I become the subject of my own critique." He paid the trailer's $120,000 cost himself, he said, "to protect the project's integrity."

Installed at the Whitney in a carpeted gallery outfitted with vintage theater seats, his "Caligula" has all the glamour and bombast of a trailer for any other sword-and-sandal epic, except for one thing: it advertises a film that doesn't exist.

All the same, it is very convincing.

The work capitalizes on the back story behind a real movie, the notorious feature-length "Caligula" made in 1979, whose cast included Ms. Mirren and Adriana Asti -- Ms. Asti also figures in Mr. Vezzoli's trailer -- and a screenplay by Mr. Vidal. When the film's producer, Bob Guccione, shifted the focus of the picture from history to pornography, Mr. Vidal went to court to have his name removed from the title.

Yet the writer gave Mr. Vezzoli's project his blessing and even agreed to appear onscreen to introduce it. "It's irresistible to have a part that takes only three minutes to do in the best thing about any movie, which is the trailer," he said by telephone from Los Angeles. "I knew right off that this was a great art form."

Last summer, during its premiere at the 2005 Venice Biennale, the work became one of the exhibition's hottest tickets. Yet some viewers took the artist for a celebrity-worshipping pretender whose trailer was a little too much like the real thing to qualify as art.

Such criticism only flatters Mr. Vezzoli. "It means they didn't get the joke," he said, "and to me that is an achievement."

The "Caligula" trailer resulted in exhibitions for both new and existing video installations in cities including Shanghai, Toronto, Prague and Los Angeles, where "The Gore Vidal Trilogy," his first commercial show in the United States, will open on April 15 at the Larry Gagosian Gallery. The same month, he will exhibit three new pieces -- in video, neon and photography -- based on seminal works of the 1960's by the artist Bruce Nauman, at Galerie Neu in Berlin.

In a new video -- "Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!," commissioned by the Pinault Foundation for its new home in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, he borrows the format of a VH-1 television show to portray himself in a tortured relationship with Marlene Dietrich -- that is, the Dietrich of Maximilian Schell's 1984 film, "Marlene," about the star, which involves her friendship with the Bauhaus textile artist Anni Albers. An excerpt will play in June 2 at Tate Modern in London.

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Asked how he keeps on top of so many different projects, Mr. Vezzoli said, "I don't drink or do drugs, and I have very little sex." After a pause, he added, "Well, maybe phone sex." Like many artists who exhibit internationally and work on multiple projects at once, he conducts most of his business by cellphone. Mr. Vezzoli was born in Brescia, in northern Italy, the only child of a lawyer and a pediatrician who both encouraged him to seek out the arts. Fluent in English from an early age, he received a classical education in Greek and Roman literature and history. After graduation he headed to London, but by the mid-1990's was enrolled at Central St. Martins, the London art college.

It was there that he became adept at blending the imaginary with the real. His first artworks were embroidered samplers of messages he found on calling cards that prostitutes left in phone booths -- "Give me some hanky-panky," or "I'm hot and horny, give me a call," and so on.

"Growing up," he said, "I only knew the provocations of Arte Povera," the label applied to Italian artists of the 1960's and 70's who experimented with humble everyday materials. "And doing needlework was the most provocative gesture I could think of." (His embroidered photographs of figures related to his videos, printed on canvas, can fetch up to $40,000 at auction.) Today he has expanded his boundaries. The best way to penetrate the culture at large, he said, is to use the language most accessible to a broad audience -- that is, the language of film, television and fashion.

To make that film, Pasolini, who was gay, traveled around Italy interviewing random subjects about various sexual behaviors. Mr. Vezzoli, who is also gay, updated the format by creating an hourlong reality-TV show. In an Italian version of "The Dating Game," women of a certain age, including Ms. Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Marianne Faithful, were called upon to choose a date for the evening from a pool of young contestants who were male, female or something in between. After each decision, members of the audience were invited onstage to review the choice, ultimately voting on their favorite couple.

In a telephone interview from Paris, Ms. Moreau attributed her interest in the project to the depth of Mr. Vezzoli's commitment.

"To trust someone to be a director is to be curious," she said. "It's to want to discover things. And that's the way I am and always have been." Louis Malle, who is widely credited with making Ms. Moreau a star in the late 1950's, had only made a documentary when they first met, she noted, "and that was about a fish."

In Mr. Vezzoli's video, Ms. Moreau arrives late, after the audience has departed, but finds her potential suitors still waiting. "To see these young men doing incredible things to seduce a woman because they are on television -- it's fascinating," she said.

Recorded at a television studio in Rome, only the star performers and the production team knew that the show was headed for art exhibitions in Venice and Milan, and not for Italian television. (The work will be screened in Paris beginning May 9, in a group exhibition at the Grand Palais.) Strangely enough, the studio audience seemed not to be familiar with Ms. Deneuve or Ms. Faithful but cheered wildly for a young up-and-coming actress, Terry Schiavo, from Italian television who was unknown to Mr. Vezzoli and Ms. Prada. (They cast her at an open call.)

Now Ms. Prada is thinking of actually putting Mr. Vezzoli's show on television, although she acknowledged: "Maybe that's more my ambition than Francesco's." To that end, she commissioned Mr. Vezzoli to create a new, feature-length video inspired by the television show: an updated version of the Kinsey Report, relying on sex questionnaires prepared by actual researchers from collaborating universities. Still in the planning stages, it will be Mr. Vezzoli's first real documentary -- no divas allowed. So far, he has been more historian than innovator, dredging up the past to explain the present. For the Whitney Biennial's curators, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, that makes the "Caligula" trailer ideally suited to its moment. "It's an artwork that contains its own critique," said Mr. Vergne, who is also deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Ms. Iles, the Whitney's film and video specialist, interjected, "And it so mirrors what's going on in this country."

The short offers a surprise ending. After Mr. Vidal winkingly tells viewers that the "film" will be "coming soon to a theater near you," the credits roll and the screen goes dark. Just when the audience might be rising from their seats, an earthy Courtney Love suddenly appears as the fake film's actual Caligula to deliver a brief soliloquy. "How lonely it is to be a god," she begins.

"That is my moment," Mr. Vezzoli explained, "That's when I pull back the curtain to reveal that what you are seeing is not what you thought."